"Uptown Girl" peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 for five consecutive weeks from November 12 to December 10, 1983.[7] It also reached number one in the United Kingdom for five weeks, his only number-one hit in the country. It was the second-best-selling single of 1983 in the United Kingdom behind only Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon", which Joel had knocked off the number-one position on November 1, 1983. The song was the 19th-best-selling single of the 1980s in the United Kingdom, selling 975,000 copies. It has sold over 1.2 million copies as of 2023.
Inspiration
According to an interview with Howard Stern, Joel had originally titled the song "Uptown Girls", and it was conceived on an occasion when he was surrounded by Christie Brinkley, Whitney Houston, and his then-girlfriend Elle Macpherson. According to numerous interviews with Joel, the song was initially written about his relationship with Macpherson, but it ended up also becoming about his soon-to-be wife, Brinkley, both women being two of the most famous supermodels of the 1980s.[8] Joel said that the song was inspired by the music of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.[9]
Christie Brinkley, Joel's future wife, appears as the main character of the video
Reception
Cash Box said that "sounding uncannily like Frankie Valli, Joel plays out the city uptown-downtown caste system, longing for a seemingly unavailable 'white-bread' lovely."[10]
Music video
The video depicts Joel and his backup singers working as auto mechanics. Brinkley arrives in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce as Joel and the mechanics dance with her. A poster of Brinkley can be seen in the garage as well as on a billboard above the garage advertising "Uptown Cosmetics". At the end of the video Joel and Brinkley ride off on a motorcycle. Before the song starts, footage from the music video "Tell Her About It" is seen playing on a Portable TV.
Joel said, ""Uptown Girl" I wasn't too crazy about, because they wanted me to dance. I sort of said, OK, you know, I'll give it a try. We shot it on the two hottest days of the year. We were down on the Bowery, and all these bums kept butting in with 'A-a-ay Cri-i-ist-a-ay!'"[11]
Olivia Rodrigo mentioned the song and Joel in her hit single "Deja Vu", which became a top 3 U.S. hit.[44] Rodrigo made a surprise appearance at Joel's Madison Square Garden performance on August 24, 2022, singing "Deja Vu" with Joel on piano and "Uptown Girl" as a duet with Joel.[45][46]
Irish boy bandWestlife covered the song for their third studio album, World of Our Own. It was released on March 5, 2001 as the lead single from the album and the 2001 Comic Relief charity single. The song was also released as the fifth single for the European Special Edition and Asian Deluxe Edition Bonus Disc of the group's second album, Coast to Coast (2000). The Westlife version is slightly shorter than the Billy Joel version because one of the verses was not repeated. The music video was a parody of the Billy Joel one, with the members of Westlife playing workers in a burger bar, Robert Bathurst, Crispin Bonham-Carter, Ioan Gruffudd, Tim McInnerny and James Wilby play the snobby uptown customers and Claudia Schiffer is in the Christie Brinkley role.
"Uptown Girl" reached number one in Ireland, Mexico and the United Kingdom. It became the best-selling single of 2001 and the tenth-best-selling single of all time in Ireland. In the United Kingdom, it was the sixth-best-selling single of 2001 and the 24th-best-selling single of the decade in the UK charts, with sales of 756,215 copies. It became the band's best-selling single (paid-for and combined sales categories) in the UK and also achieved the highest first week sales (292,318 copies) of any of their singles. It has since been certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry for shipments of 600,000 copies.[48] By March 2017, the song had sold almost 800,000 copies in the country from physical and digital copies which make up 81% of the total units.[49] As of January 2019, it has 920,000 total sales. It is also their second most streamed song in the United Kingdom of all-time. In 30 November 2021, it has 1.1 million total sales with 67% of it or 748,000 were physical sales.[49] This makes the single as part of the list of million-selling singles in the United Kingdom and the first one for the group.
In Mexico, the song was the fourth-best-selling single of 2001.[citation needed]
^Pennanen, Timo (2006). Sisältää hitin – levyt ja esittäjät Suomen musiikkilistoilla vuodesta 1972 (in Finnish) (1st ed.). Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava. p. 263. ISBN978-951-1-21053-5.
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